Helluva Engineer Magazine

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FEATURES: Our Sustainable Future

Powering Up

Our researchers are creating new technologies that pollute less and store more energy — while also ensuring the manufacturing process is clean.

Planting the Seeds of the Farm of the Future

Georgia Tech engineers are working to reduce the environmental impact of farming while creating technologies to help farmers feed a growing world and adapt to a changing climate.

To Hell with Garbage

In the quest to reduce, reuse, and recycle, Georgia Tech engineers are at work on ways to divert more trash from landfills, tame plastic pollution, and cut waste from electronics.

From the Dean

Dear Friends,

In all the ways you might define it, advancing sustainability has never been more critical — and more exciting. That’s why it’s our focus in this issue of Helluva Engineer.

Consider: The Georgia Department of Economic Development projects that renewable bioenergy will put more than $5 billion into the state’s economy in the next decade. Meanwhile, electric vehicle, battery, and solar power manufacturing is taking off in Georgia, with billions of dollars in investments announced in the last few years. This is in addition to Southern Company opening two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro.

These pursuits and initiatives have made Georgia one of the nation’s leaders in clean energy resources. And Georgia Tech is right at the vanguard. In the College of Engineering, our researchers are focused on many facets of energy technology: wind, nuclear, solar, aviation fuels, batteries, and beyond.

Meanwhile, we’re also working on sustainability technology and innovation that will benefit another heavy-hitting Georgia industry: agriculture and agribusiness. Engineers are developing techniques to reduce fertilizer runoff and find new ways to recycle waste into useful nutrients for growing crops.

Our engineers also are dreaming up materials that could reduce the growing piles of electronic waste and reuse the plastics that have infiltrated every corner of our planet.

Now, there’s no question the advancements made by humankind are remarkable. But as I tell our students frequently, it’s no longer enough just to advance. Engineers are taught to focus on traditional constraints such as safety, cost, size, and performance. Along with those, we must also ensure that the solutions we develop to society’s problems serve all people. We call this equity-centered engineering, and you’ll read more in this issue about how we’re advancing that principle.

I’m tremendously proud of the energy and sustainability advancements our faculty, students, and alumni are developing. We are excited to share some of them with you in this issue.

Have a great holiday season, and my best wishes for a happy and healthy 2025.

Raheem Beyah
Dean and Southern Company Chair